In an emergency department in Calgary, a woman says she slipped on the ice, but her injuries don’t match a fall. In a private setting, the nurse begins to talk to her about domestic violence. Initially, the patient insists that she slipped, but after a long conversation, the nurse and the patient call the police together.…

When Melissa Shears applied to medical school, it felt like a lottery. “You hear the numbers of how many people apply, and how many people get in – it’s quite overwhelming,” she says. But now the first year Queen’s medical student has a different perspective. “I think they look for people with really diverse and…

Across Canada, governments, medical schools and health providing organizations continue to struggle with one of the most difficult questions in health care: How many doctors in each area of medicine do we train today to meet tomorrow’s health care needs? In Ontario, concern of an oversupply of doctors in some specialties led the government to…

The boy stopped breathing. That morning, he had been admitted with what seemed like a seizure to the emergency room at IWK Health Centre in Halifax. He had been given drugs to stop the seizure. Katrina Hurley, an emergency doctor just starting her night shift and taking over the case, thought the boy was over-sedated…

Reports of low-skilled Canadian workers being replaced with those from other countries spurred changes earlier this year to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. But they’ve made it harder for areas in need of physicians as well. The system was overhauled this summer after reports that companies were misusing the program, with Canadian workers at RBC and…

Can health care learn from assembly lines? Manitoba’s St. Boniface General Hospital thinks so. It’s been using Lean, a system inspired by Toyota, on processes around the institution. Last year, one of its projects was to reduce wait times for CT scans. Staff ran a Rapid Improvement Event, where a team mapped out patient flow and…

The United States began releasing the Medicare payments it made to individual doctors on April 9, a move that sparked sensational headlines and debates about privacy. The data offer insights into the $77 billion paid by Medicare’s fee-for-service program to more than 880,000 health care professionals in 2012. Should Canadian provinces follow the U.S.’s lead and publicly…

Family medicine was a popular choice among medical graduates in the 1980s, when Roger Strasser was training at The University of Western Ontario. “The residents had almost a missionary zeal that they were going to be family doctors,” he says. He shared their passion, becoming a family physician. But when he returned to Canada in 2002, after going back…

After several decades working in the Canadian military, Physician Assistants (PAs) are being introduced into provincial health care systems. This year, Alberta launched a two-year demonstration project to integrate PAs into selected clinical practices. About a decade ago ago, PAs were introduced in Manitoba and Ontario. In Ontario, PAs were part of Ontario’s broader health human resources…

This is the second of a two-part series on Alberta’s health care restructuring. This article examines the impact of constant change at the highest levels of administration on those who work within the health care system. Alberta Health Services (AHS) is the largest health care delivery organization in Canada. AHS provides health care to nearly…

As part of the 2003 Health Accord, the Federal Government made major investments in interprofessional education. This included contributing $28 million dollars to build training centres across Canadian colleges and universities. Investing in interprofessional education was motivated by the belief that changing the way health care professionals work together would be a key part of…

Much of the focus on the health care needs of Canada’s aging population surrounds the shortage of physicians with expertise in care of older adults. But the country’s 75,000 licensed physicians represent only a small part of the Canadian health care workforce. By contrast, there are approximately 360,000 regulated nurses, 35,000 social workers, 30,000 pharmacists,…

Our health care system faces a disturbing paradox. While seniors represent the fastest growing age group in Canada, the country faces a growing deficiency of specialist physicians with expertise in caring for the elderly. But with seniors accounting for nearly half of all the country’s hospitalizations and visiting their family physician twice as often as younger…

After finishing medical school, new doctors go through several years of post-graduate, on-the-job training – known as residency – in order to become licensed to practice independently. Historically, residency has involved very long hours spent in hospital, so that residents see a high volume of diverse cases as well as provide patient care. As part…

A growing number of Canadian doctors are underemployed after finishing their training. There are a number of likely causes, including a lack of infrastructure funding, delayed retirements, and a lack of health human resource planning at the national level. After about two decades of strongly worded public headlines and numerous government reports about doctor shortages,…

In Ontario, specialists are concentrated in larger cities, and Ontarians living in smaller cities and rural regions have challenges accessing specialist services. In Ontario, Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) use non-financial incentives to try to attract specialists to practice in hospitals that serve rural areas, and provide telemedicine and outreach clinics for patients. In contrast,…

Each year thousands of medical students across Canada apply for, and are matched to, residency positions in a variety of medical specialties. The allocation of residency training positions among the various specialties is largely decided by academic doctors involved with medical education. Some experts believe that health system decision makers should exert greater influence over…

Over the past five years, the number of Canadians studying medicine abroad has more than doubled. Almost all of these medical students want to practice in Canada. Is it good for Canada to rely on foreign medical schools to train our future doctors? David Li, a family doctor in Oshawa, is one of Ross University’s…

This document is provided under the terms of a CreativeCommons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license. The terms of the license are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/. Attributions are to be made to HealthyDebate.ca, a project under the direction of Dr. Andreas Laupacis, at the Keenan Research Centre, Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael’s Hospital.